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Erik's Name appears when he is three years old, thin lines of colourful squiggles on his chest above where he can feel his heart beating. He touches it with his chubby fingers, looks at the strange shapes in the mirror.
"What does it say?" he asks his mama eagerly, not yet able to read.
His mama is quiet for a while. "Charles," she says. She smiles, but there is something strange about it that he doesn't quite understand. Erik rolls the unfamiliar sound around his tongue, stumbling clumsily over the flowing syllable.
It is only years later that he understands his mother's warnings to never reveal his Name to his friends, as children sometimes do. "You need to be careful," she says, pressing a kiss into his hair, "but never be ashamed. When you meet your Charles, be open to him." Erik nods. He traces over the familiar curls of the letters, and can't imagine being anything but happy to meet his soulmate. He doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks, he knows that soulmates are precious.
When Erik is fifteen, he watches in horror as the trail of blood seeps from the hole in his mama's forehead, her eyes unseeing no matter how hard he screams. Every bit of metal in the room goes flying, the soldiers' helmets crush their wearers' brains to mulch, and Klaus Schmidt laughs in the background. The next thing Erik knows, he is shackled to a wooden table, Schmidt leaning over him with gleaming tools that won't answer his call and a maniacal grin. The doctor is in the middle of cutting open Erik's shirt and when he sees the Name on his chest, he chuckles. The assistant spits in disgust, spewing a hailstorm of curses.
After Schmidt is done for the day, Erik is left alone to clean himself up and inspect his bruises. In a panic, he realizes that the skin over his chest is blank under the red of his new wounds. He rubs where the Name should be, praying for it to be a powder the Nazis had put on him or a trick of his stinging eyes, watching for it to reappear, but the space remains stubbornly empty. His scrubbing reopens the barely closed wound, but everything already hurts so much that he can't bring himself to care.
Several weeks later, a different Name appears on the patch of skin, distorted by the raised ridges of scars: Magda.
Erik doesn't want Magda.
Of course, he does when he actually meets Magda years later, who is every bit as haunted as he is. But it doesn't matter in the end anyway, because she doesn't want him.
Charles Xavier is unlike anyone Erik has ever known. He is kind and brilliant and the most irritatingly endearing sort of naive. He is contradictory in his efforts to do what he believes is right, and he is puzzlingly cheerful in arguing with Erik. He is a frustration and a fascination. It makes Erik wish that he was the telepath, so that he could dive into the man's mind and investigate every last surprising, scintillating part of him. He is beautiful.
He makes Erik remember the scribbled script that once decorated his chest. He wonders until he is afraid that Charles will hear him. A part of himself answers with such bone-deep certainty that he has to bury it as far as he is able.
So, when Charles crawls into his bed in the dark of the rundown motel room, he is both shocked and not surprised at all. Every apprehension flies out the window as Charles pushes himself above Erik, his warm breath soft and embracing over his face as he whispers his name.
It is only in the light of the next morning that Erik sees the lines inked over Charles' heart. Lilandra. Erik feels sick, even if he should know better. Charles reaches over a gentle hand to lift up his chin. The look he gives Erik is not a smile or a frown but still manages to be incredibly sad, as if he knows. Of course he knows. "It used to say Erik," he says.
For the first time in a decade, Erik cries.
"We want the same thing."
"My friend, I'm sorry, but we do not."